


Follow the Pipes

by S0lstice



Series: Whumptober 2019 [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), Spider-Man - All Media Types
Genre: Concussions, Gen, Hurt Peter Parker, Hurt/Comfort, Irondad, Kidnapping, Mention of vomit but it doesn't happen, Prompt #1: Shaky Hands, Whumptober 2019, spiderson
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-01
Updated: 2019-10-01
Packaged: 2020-11-09 07:20:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20849627
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/S0lstice/pseuds/S0lstice
Summary: Tony wakes up at the bottom of a bomb shelter with a concussed Peter next to him, their only means of escape being a hatch 40 feet directly above them.





	Follow the Pipes

**Author's Note:**

> I'm giving this year's Whumptober a go! They will almost assuredly all be Irondad focused, and I've made a series so they can be found more easily. 
> 
> Prompt #1: Shaky Hands

Tony rolled onto his side, coughing slightly as heavy dust caught in his throat and lungs. A few weak beams of light filtered through the air, illuminating the space around him just barely enough for him to make out Peter lying unconscious a few yards away.   
  
“Kid,” he hissed towards the young man’s unmoving form. “Hey buddy, you gotta wake up.”   
  
He couldn’t see Peter’s face. He was on his back, ankles tied tightly, hands secured underneath him, and head rolled in the opposite direction. He didn’t so much as twitch in response to Tony’s voice and the older man pulled and struggled against the coarse ropes that held his hands behind his back as well.   
  
They were in what Tony suspected was an old bomb shelter deep in the earth that had been converted into a makeshift holding cell. The limestone walls were smooth and perfectly cylindrical like a giant well, but the opening high above them was sealed off with a heavy steel hatch. A few pipes jutted out up and down the walls, connecting to what had most likely been a sink and a toilet. Both had been removed, however, leaving Tony and Peter alone on the dusty, dirty floor.   
  
“Hey! Kiddo!” he tried again. No response.   
  
He shuffled awkwardly toward the teenager, then swiveled until he could gently push against Peter’s hip with his feet.   
  
“Peter!” he said a little bit louder.   
  
Anxiety had been simmering deep in his gut for several hours now, ever since he’d felt a taser jam into the small of his back and a baseball bat had broken over the side of Peter’s head. The boy had dropped like a rock without ever knowing he’d been hit. He hadn’t moved a muscle since, which was more than a little worrying. He may be super human, but a blow like that followed by hours of unconsciousness was pretty indicative of a serious concussion.   
  
He pushed Peter with his feet again, rocking the teenager’s body as hard as he dared. “Peter!”  
  
Finally he heard a deep groan and Peter’s head rolled in his direction, giving Tony a good view of the dried blood that ran from his temple, down his face, and into his ear.   
  
“That’s it bud, come on.”  
  
Tony waited in vain for further movement.  
  
“PARKER!” He yelled sharply, his voice echoing about their stone enclosure. Peter’s face scrunched at the loud noise and he groaned again in protest.   
  
“Pete?”  
  
Glassy, unfocused brown eyes blinked open.  
  
“Hey, there you are, kid. How’re you doing, you with me?”  
  
For a few frightening moments Peter just stared back at him with blank, half-lidded eyes, and the anxiety in Tony’s chest began to tighten as the seconds passed by.   
  
“Mm hm,” Peter finally hummed in affirmation and Tony released a long breath.   
  
“Okay Peter, we need to get out of here ASAP, but I need your help to do that. D’you think you’re up to helping me out?”  
  
Peter blinked lazily a few times then nodded his head. Whether or not he actually understood, Tony couldn’t tell. But he was relieved at the cognitive responses nonetheless.   
  
“Okay, good. That’s good. Do you think you can get out of those ropes?”  
  
Peter’s brow furrowed in confusion. “Ro-... there’s... um. There’s...” He shifted slightly and felt the restriction on his wrists. “Oh. Yeah, okay.”   
  
He pulled at them experimentally and then rolled onto his side toward Tony with a small grunt. His gray t-shirt and jeans had both turned several shades lighter from all the dust and fine sand clinging to them. The muscles in his arms bulged and his face scrunched again as he strained against his bonds.   
  
Within a few seconds his arms popped free and he was rubbing at the kinks in his shoulders. “Ugh... ow.”  
  
“Okay kid, good. Now your ankles.”  
  
He laid still long enough for Tony to think he hadn’t heard him before slowly curling into a ball to reach his ankles and pulling those ropes apart as well.   
  
“Where are we?” Peter’s voice was a bit rough, his words slurred. He coughed as the dust began to get to him, then winced and brought his hands up to his head. “Ow.”  
  
“I know, sorry kiddo. You got whacked on the head really good.”  
  
Peter felt around gingerly at the blood on his face, fingers following the trail up to what must have been an extremely tender bump at his hairline. He glanced at the flakes of dried blood that came away on his fingertips, then looked at Tony and began to crawl toward him.  
  
“In answer to your question, I don’t know where we are,” Tony said, watching him carefully as he approached and noting his dilated pupils with unease. “Not in the city, though, that’s for sure.”  
  
“Why are we?” Peter sat next to him and began to untie Tony’s ankles.   
  
“‘_Why_ are we?’”  
  
“Um,” Peter stalled as he moved on to Tony’s hands, clearly having trouble talking and working with the ropes at the same time. “Here. I mean. Why’re we here? Do y’know what’s happening?”  
  
_Yeah, definitely a concussion_.  
  
The ties on his wrists finally fell away and Tony sat up, taking a few seconds to shake out the tingling in his hands before pulling himself to his feet. “Well. I don’t know much. The guys who took us weren’t the chatting type. Which was honestly disappointing, half the fun of kidnappings is the banter.”   
  
He began to circle the space, running his hands along the smooth walls and squinting up towards the circular hatch high above them. “What I did overhear though, is that they plan to put us on a plane, and that absolutely cannot happen. I’m guessing this is just a pit stop near some old unused airport and we’re all waiting for the plane to get here.”  
  
He was met with silence and turned his attention back to Peter, who was still sitting exactly where Tony had left him. They stared at each other for a few seconds and he could practically see the teenager’s poor rattled brain working overtime to catch up. Finally he nodded.  
  
“We can’t... uh, we can’t be here when the plane gets here.”  
  
Tony smiled fondly at him. “Right.”  
  
Peter got unsteadily to his feet, swaying a bit. Tony gripped his upper arm until he got his balance and then pointed up to the ceiling.   
  
“Okay, that’s the only way out, and there is an alarm connected to that hatch. I can’t get up there, but you can. If you can deactivate the alarm you should be able to get out.”  
  
Peter let out a long breath as he stared up at the metal box on the wall next to the hatch. “God.”  
  
“Yeah. I’m sorry, kid. I know you’re not in great shape. If I thought there was any other way to get us out of this, I would do it.”  
  
“Can we call someone?”   
  
“They took our phones. Maybe we can find them when we get up there, but first we have to actually get up there. There should be a rope ladder that you can toss down for us non-superhuman folks.”  
  
“Can we climb out the um... the lights?”  
  
Tony glanced at his intern in time to see him wobble and then lean heavily against the wall, closing his eyes.   
  
“Whoa, easy.” Tony grabbed his shoulder to help steady him against the wall. He stopped himself on the verge asking Peter whether he was feeling okay. The answer was obvious.  
  
Peter answered the unspoken question anyway. “My head really hurts, Mr. Stark. I feel like I might throw up.” He raised his eyes to meet Tony’s gaze, where the older man found a mixture of pain, guilt and shame that only Peter Parker was capable of.  
  
“Okay, that’s okay,” Tony said carefully, placing his hand on the non-bloodied side of Peter’s head and rubbing his hair briefly. “You can throw up if you need to, I won’t mind. Hey, I used to throw up on a weekly basis during my partying years. Just take it easy for minute.”   
  
Peter closed his eyes again and sagged against the wall. Tony stepped back to give him space in case he needed it, trying to balance the urgency of their situation with his unwillingness to worsen Peter’s condition or cause him more pain.   
  
He paced across the floor a couple times and took off his sport coat, leaving him in just his AC/DC shirt and jeans. Despite the bunker being mostly underground, the sun filtering in and the lack of fresh air had warmed it up considerably and it was beginning to feel like the inside of a kiln.   
  
He followed the sunbeams with his eyes and wondered if Peter was asking about the possibility of escaping through the windows when he mentioned climbing toward the lights. Unfortunately that wouldn’t be an option. The sunlight did shine through long tunnels that led up to the surface, but the tunnel openings were only about two feet by two feet.   
  
“No way through the windows, squirt, in case you were wondering.”  
  
“Huh. Yeah, I see.” Peter was at his side again, staring dazedly up with him. He was looking a little bit less pale but one of his hands had unconsciously found Tony’s sleeve to keep his balance and sweat was beginning to collect at his hairline. “So I just need to climb up to that box, right? Do you know how to turn it off? To um... to disarm it?”  
  
“You’ll have to tell me what it looks like when you get up there so we know what we’re working with. But I’m sure we can rub our two genius brain cells together and figure it out.”  
  
Peter gave a little huff of laughter and then, without preamble, began to crawl up the side of the dusty stone wall. It had to be at least three or four stories high in total, possibly more, and Tony couldn’t help but pace restlessly as he watched Peter climb higher and higher.  
  
His movements weren’t nearly as coordinated or fluid as Tony was used to seeing, but he was making good progress regardless, and Tony felt a touch of pride as he made his way up.   
  
Things began to take a bad turn when he reached about three quarters of the way up, however. His pace began to slow, his movements growing increasingly sluggish until finally he stopped altogether.   
  
Tony watched and waited for a few moments to see if Peter would start up again but he just stayed frozen against the wall.   
  
“Pete? How’re we doin’ up there?”  
  
“Dizzy,” the teenager murmured, leaning his forehead against the smooth limestone. His voice was quiet, but it echoed downward just enough for Tony to hear him. “It’s okay, Mr. Stark. It’s just... kinda hot up here.” Sweat had seeped through his t-shirt, darkening his back and under his arms.   
  
_Of course, hot air rises_, Tony thought. It was already stifling where Tony was on the ground. It must be near unbearable at the top.   
  
“You’re doing really good, kiddo. You gotta keep going, though, okay? We’re running out of time.” Tony’s heart clenched in guilt. Peter was clearly nearing his limit and Tony wanted nothing more than to set the kid down, let him rest, and find a way for them to escape himself.   
  
But their situation didn’t allow time for rest. Tony didn’t know when the men who took them would return, but he knew that things would almost surely go from bad to worse when they did. He had frighteningly little information on them, which in itself showed their intelligence and experience. He didn’t know who they were, where they were taking he and Peter, and most importantly why they were taken in the first place and what waited for them at their final destination. What he did know was that they were well prepared, with this bomb shelter and a goddamn plane on it’s way.   
  
Torture and/or execution were not at all outside the realm of possibility at the end of their journey and if pushing Peter past his limits now meant sparing him from that future, then that’s what he’d do.  
  
“Look up and to your right. Do you see that black pipe?”  
  
Peter didn’t move.   
  
“Pete, it looks like it might support you. If you can get to it you can hold onto it.”   
  
His intern nodded slowly against the stone wall.   
  
“Kid?”  
  
Unease sat heavy in the pit of Tony’s stomach.   
  
“Peter? Stay with me, bud, stay focused.”  
  
The boy’s right hand slid slowly outward, blindly looking for the pipe like Tony had instructed him, but he was nowhere near it.   
  
“You gotta climb up a few more paces before you can -“  
  
Peter’s head lolled back, his hands slid from the wall, and then he was free falling backwards through the air.   
  
Tony’s heart stopped dead in his chest, his blood running cold as his protégé’s body plummeted towards him. Flashes of light illuminated his limp form as he whizzed through beams of dusty sunlight. Tony had stepped back a ways to get a good view of the wall but now he darted forward again, desperate to get under Peter before he hit the ground.   
  
He made it with a few seconds to spare and tilted backward slightly to be sure the kid wouldn’t fly straight through his arms. Then Peter slammed into him and Tony wrapped his arms protectively around the boy’s body as best he could as he toppled backwards under him.  
  
As soon as he got his bearings he rolled them over, his heart thundering in his chest.   
  
“_Peter!_” He grabbed the teenager’s slack face between his hands and patted his cheeks. His skin was pink and overheated under his hands. “Kid?!”  
  
He pressed two fingers into Peter’s neck to check his heart rate. It was steady, though perhaps a little bit too fast. He pushed sweat-dampened curls off of his forehead, then let his fingers continue into his hair to look for any new bumps on the off chance that he had hit his head against the floor upon landing. He knew he wouldn’t find anything, he knew his arm had been protecting Peter’s head, but it made him feel better to check.   
  
“Peter,” he called firmly, taking the bottom of the boy’s shirt and flapping it rapidly to get some air moving against him. “Come on, buddy. I just got you awake, you can’t conk out on me again so soon.”  
  
As if in reply, Peter’s hazy brown eyes fluttered open again. He slowly focused in on Tony’s face, then looked to the ceiling behind him.   
  
“_Crap_,” he moaned. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Stark. Did I fall down?”  
  
“Yes, you fell down!” Tony snapped, nerves putting an unintentional bite to his words. But Peter paid it no mind, already pushing himself up into a sitting position.   
  
“Whoa whoa whoa, you stay down,” Tony ordered, keeping a firm grip on Peter’s shoulder to keep him from standing.   
  
Peter looked from the ceiling back down to Tony in confusion. “What? No, I can do it Mr. Stark. I just passed out for a minute, but I know I can do it.”  
  
“You passed out 30 feet in the air, Peter! You’re not going back up, no way.”  
  
“I think I just took too long. If I go shorter, then the heat won’t-... I mean if I go faster then I won’t get as hot as fast.”   
  
Tony took a few seconds trying to decide whether any of that made sense. Before he could work it out, Peter looked back up the wall and stood as though Tony’s grip on his shoulder wasn’t even there.   
  
Tony huffed and stood up as well. A dull ache flared through his lower back as he moved, followed by a sharp pain in one of his elbows. One of the downsides of being flattened by a free falling teenager, he figured, as he pushed himself up.  
  
“I was almost there,” Peter murmured, staring up at the alarm box. He listed dangerously to one side in his attempt to get to the wall but made it there nonetheless and braced himself against it with his hands.   
  
“Hey!” he said suddenly, rounding on Tony as though a light bulb had been turned on in his head. “How will you get out once I’m up there? How were they planning to get us out?”  
  
“There’s a rope ladder at the top, remember? They pulled it up behind them.”  
  
Once again it took an unhealthy amount of time for Peter to process and organize that information. Then he simply started up the wall again.   
  
“_Hey!_” Tony called, lurching forward. Peter was already moving faster than he had the first time, but Tony managed to grab onto his ankle. “I don’t want you going up there again. Come back down.”  
  
“I have to, Mr. Stark, that’s the only way out.” He looked down at Tony with earnest eyes but it only made Tony’s grip on him tighten.   
  
“Okay, just... just come down for a second. If you’re going to do it then we need to plan it better.”  
  
“What’s there to plan? I just have to go up.”  
  
“Okay, but there’s a couple pipes that - God, just come down for a second!” He gave Peter’s ankle a careful but insistent tug, then caught him under the arms when he obediently slid back to the ground.   
  
“Okay look.” Tony backed him up several steps and pointed at the pipes running vertically up the wall. “See that thin silver pipe? Head for that one first and hang onto it if you need to. Then go to the thicker one higher up and to the left of it, and then finally to the big black one right near the alarm box. If you get to that one you can probably let it support you while you work on the alarm. You almost made it there last time without stopping, so I bet you can do it if you just take a couple seconds at those first two pipes to rest.”  
  
To Tony’s relief, Peter seemed to follow his words pretty well.  
  
“Follow the pipes,” he mumbled, his eyes moving up the wall above them.  
  
“Follow the pipes,” Tony affirmed, giving Peter’s shoulder a squeeze. “I’ll help guide you from down here.”   
  
Peter nodded and began his second attempt. Still uncoordinated. Shaky. But there was a determination in his movements this time as he made a beeline for the first pipe, and he made it there surprisingly quickly. He wedged his foot in the gap where the pipe protruded from the wall and held on for a few seconds.   
  
“Awesome, good job. Only two more to go.”  
  
Peter glanced down at him with a weak smile before turning his attention upward and starting off again.   
  
“Hey, give yourself a minute, Pete. That was the plan.”  
  
“Sorry, Mr. Stark, I’ve got a chemistry quiz in two days that I haven’t studied for yet.”  
  
“Christ,” Tony muttered under his breath, but the corners of his lips twitched upwards in a small smile. Joking and thinking beyond his immediate surroundings was a good sign.   
  
He continued to make good time but was breathing heavily by the time he got to the second pipe. This time he wedged his foot in again but then crouched down on that leg and wrapped both hands around the pipe, leaning into it and letting it support some of his weight.   
  
“You feeling dizzy again?” Tony called up, rubbing nervously at his aching elbow and feeling frustratingly useless on the ground.   
  
“A little bit,” Peter replied, briefly closing his eyes as he hugged the pipe. “I’m just super tired. Like ‘I could sleep through the first Star Wars movie’ tired.”  
  
“Holy shit, that is tired.”  
  
“Not The Empire Strikes Back, though. Just the first one.”  
  
“Oh okay, so not all hope is lost.”  
  
“Not all hope, just A New Hope.”  
  
“...Was that a reference? You know I don’t get half of your references.”  
  
Peter opened his eyes wide and looked down at him in dismay. “That was such an easy one though, Mr. Stark.”  
  
“Whatever kid, just sit tight for a minute.”  
  
“No, I’m okay.” He disentangled himself from the pipe and started crawling again, eyes focused upward.  
  
“You’re not very good at listening and following instructions, you know that?”  
  
“Yeah, I know...” To Peter’s credit, he sounded genuinely disappointed in himself.   
  
They both quieted to allow Peter to save his breath as he reached the height he’d fallen from last time, but he just pushed steadily past it. The closer he got to the black pipe the faster he seemed to go. Tony wanted to yell for him to slow down, but before he could even open his mouth Peter was pulling up along side it and squeezing himself in between the pipe and the wall.  
  
“This is so dumb!” Peter called down as he got himself situated.   
  
Tony couldn’t help a snort of laughter. “What’s dumb?”  
  
“I scale buildings higher than this in like a third of the time almost every day.”  
  
“Sure, but not with a concussion after getting your head bashed in with a baseball bat.”   
  
“Wow, is that what happened?”  
  
“Yeah. Okay, can you reach the alarm from there?”  
  
Peter was a lot smaller and harder to see that high up but Tony watched him maneuver himself around until he was wedged in, balanced on one foot with his chest pressed against the wall and his back to the pipe. He stretched his arms above his head to reach the alarm box.  
  
“Yeah, I can mostly get to it.”  
  
Tony heard a tiny metallic popping sound followed by a small “catch!” from Peter and then the metal casing that covered the alarm was sailing down towards his head.   
  
Tony cursed, scrambling first away from its trajectory then back towards it as his mind raced through the pros and cons of trying to catch it versus letting it fall. Trying to catch it meant a good chance of bodily harm. It was only about the size of a shoebox but it was all metal and sharp corners and gravity was not his friend. However, letting it hit the ground would almost surely result in a sound loud enough to draw their kidnappers, who would open the hatch to investigate and find an oblivious and concussed Peter practically sitting on a silver platter for them.   
  
At the last second, he snatched up his sport coat and held it out, where the casing landed with a quiet thump. He only let himself revel in his split second genius for a moment before dropping the bundle to the ground and glaring up at his intern.   
  
_“Peter!”_ he spat.   
  
“I’m sorry Mr. Stark, I’m going as fast as I can!” he called back, clearly mistaking the reason for his scolding as he fiddled with some of the wiring. “It’s just, it’s hard to see and my hands are kind of shaky so I can’t see what I’m doing.”  
  
“Stop! Stop doing things!”  
  
“I don’t think I should stop for too long.”  
  
“No, Peter, if we mess this up here then that’s it, we won’t get another chance. Tell me what you see so I know what we’re working with.”  
  
“Mr. Stark, I think the sun is setting,” he said, not turning away from whatever he was doing to the alarm. His voice was tight but surprisingly lucid for someone with a concussion. “My eyes have been weird and blurry since I woke up and it’s only getting darker and harder to see. If the sun sets before we do this then we’ll be stuck for the night.”  
  
Tony took a moment to assess their lighting and realized that Peter was right - it was dimmer than it was before and had begun to turn a deep golden hue.   
  
“This pipe is super duper hot and it’s making me really sweaty, most importantly my hands, which are already shaking all over the place and kind of tingly and weird and I’m actually really scared of passing out again because if I fell from here I would die and if you tried to catch me you might die too and it’s only getting worse as time goes by but I can do this, Mr. Stark, trust me!”  
  
Tony stared up at him in stunned silence. He forced himself to remember that this was the same kid who scavenged old electronics, re-purposing and crafting them into new and better inventions. The same kid who designed and built his own web shooters at fourteen years old.   
  
He scrubbed his hands down his face and heaved a great sigh. “Okay, kid. I trust y-“  
  
“Okay, that should do it!”  
  
Tony dropped his hands in shock. “What? Already? Are you sure?” He squinted suspiciously up at Peter’s form, which was growing more and more shadowed as the seconds ticked by.   
  
“Yeah, I think so.”  
  
Tony could only watch with his heart in his throat as Peter left the relative safety of the pipe and crawled slowly and carefully right up to the corner where the wall met the ceiling hatch. He kept his feet stuck against the wall and leaned out to grab the large metal wheel that kept the hatch latched shut.   
  
He paused and Tony would’ve bet money that he had just stopped himself from turning to glance down at him.   
  
“You got this, kid.” Tony encouraged, trying his best to mask the anxious tremble in his voice. “Put your ear to the door, see if you can hear them outside.”  
  
The shadows covering Peter made it almost impossible for him to see the small responding nod. Several seconds of tense silence followed in which Tony assumed Peter was listening for the men outside, and then he slowly began to turn the wheel.   
  
Immediately a loud screeching noise flooded the cavern. At first Tony feared the alarm had gone off but then Peter yanked hard on the wheel and the screech changed into a metallic grind as the gears turned in the latch. With a final echoing clang it went silent again but Peter wasted no time in heaving the steel door upward with such force that it flipped on it’s hinges and hit the ground on the other side.   
  
Instantly the entire bomb shelter was flooded with the golden orange light of the setting sun and Tony was forced to look down and shield his eyes against the sudden change. When he looked back up, Peter was gone.   
  
He felt an instant rush of panic but knew not to call out. Instead he waited, arms crossed, one hand fidgeting as he stared hard at the lip of the opening.   
  
The sound of a scuffle erupted somewhere out of view and he momentarily stopped breathing. There was a grunt followed by the sharp call of someone who was definitely not Peter and then the air went silent again.   
  
Tony stood perfectly still, heart pounding.   
  
A minute passed.   
  
Peter should have been able to send the ladder down by now.   
  
Another minute passed.   
  
Had he been knocked out again? He hadn’t been in good fighting shape. His balance was way off, he would be considerably weaker than normal. He even admitted that his vision had been poor since he woke up -  
  
“Hey look Mr. Stark, I found our phones!” Peter popped into view at the top of the hole with a smile on his face, curly hair back-lit by the coral sunset sky. He held a phone up that was way too far away for Tony to see and then looked at it sadly. “Yours got cracked though. Which is pretty surprising, considering you make your phones way more durable than this crappy one that I’ve had forever. I mean yours still turns on, see? But it’s hard to read the screen. Maybe they broke it on purpose? I know you do those durability tests on them specifically with hammers and drills and all kinds of things though. I saw the commercial! It was really cool, especially the slow motion and that techno-metal song.”  
  
He finally seemed to trail off but then suddenly perked up again. “Oh and hey, you were right! We are right near an old airport! I mean I think it’s an airport.” He looked off at something Tony couldn’t see and his patience began to dwindle. “There’s a long strip of dirt and dead grass that I guess could be used for landing a plane. Maybe it’s just a field.”  
  
“Can you please, for the love of God, send the ladder down so I can get the hell out of this stupid hole?”  
  
“Oh right, I found that too!”  
  
He disappeared again and Tony heard a few clanks and grunts and then the heavy rope and wood ladder came clattering loudly down the side of the bunker. Tony tugged on it a few times before beginning the long climb.   
  
Peter appeared over the edge again. “It wasn’t right next to the hatch here like I thought it would be. Oh my God, Mr. Stark, that’s such a long way down.”  
  
With that he disappeared yet again and didn’t return, leaving Tony to climb the rest of the way in relative silence and wonder how long this little adrenaline burst of Peter’s would last before he went downhill again.   
  
He got his answer when he finally, _finally_ hauled himself up over the edge into the fresh air and found Peter flopped on his back, sweaty, dirty and flushed, with his arms folded over his face.   
  
Tony gave a sigh and tried unsuccessfully to dust himself off.   
  
“Ready to go home, kid?”  
  
Peter groaned and nodded before blindly holding both phones out to Tony. “I’m sorry Mr. Stark, I think your phone is broken. You can use mine if you want.”  
  
Tony shook his head and took the phones. “Alright, time to go home and get your noggin checked out. You did really good today. I’m proud.”  
  
He saw a small, bashful smile grow under Peter’s arms and couldn’t help but mirror it as he began to dial Happy’s number.  
  
“You can relax now, kiddo. I’ll take it from here.”


End file.
